City Camp Madison this Weekend!

Madison CityCamp, on Saturday, June 16th, will bring together local government officials, municipal employees, programmers, designers, citizens, and journalists to share perspectives and insights about the cities in which they live.

CityCamp recognizes that local governments and community organizations have the most direct influence and impact on our daily lives. This event seeks to create local communities of practice who are dedicated to design, process, and technology applications that make cities and other local communities more open and “user friendly”.

In Madison, we’ve had some recent community projects that build on top of open government data and/or complement existing city services, best exemplified by the Madison Metro Transit API. CityCampMadison would like to build on this momentum, learn from those experiences and explore new ideas around open, community resources that help city and municipal organizations innovate and deliver new tools to its citizens.

This is the followup to our successful 2011 CityCamp. The focus of the 2012 Camp is rough consensus and running code, with a priority on deploying working systems. While this may not be last CityCamp as a singular event, we hope it will mark the transition from occasional events to a more sustained community of civic hackers.

The day will be broken up into two parts. In the morning we will have a series of sessions by members of the Madison community discussing project and initiatives they are involved with that are contributing to the Madison ecosystem. The tentative morning scheule is posted here:

After lunch (provided by our generous sponsors), we will break into an unconference, where people can follow up with the morning presenters, host their own sessions or work together on projects. Session ideas are being discussed on Google Moderator and can give you a good sense for the types of topics that may be discussed at the event.

Our website is http://citycampmadison.org/. The camp begins at 10am on Saturday, June 16th 2012, and will take place at the Computer Sciences building on the UW campus (1210 W Dayton St). There is no cost to attend, though we do ask that you register so we can order enough food. Registration is available here: http://citycampmadison2012.eventbrite.com/